The GOP legislators who voted for this bill made no attempt to argue that it was constitutional, much less that it had any chance of passing the Senate or being signed into law by the president. It’s just another sign of how the House Republicans have given up any pretense of governing in favor of an endless parade of futile, symbolic statements of defiance, like their 37-and-counting go-nowhere votes to repeal Obamacare.

By now, you’d think a rational group of lawmakers would have accepted that however much they dislike Obamacare or abortion, they don’t have the unilateral power to end these things, so they might as well come to terms with this and focus on what they can accomplish in a divided government. Instead, the GOP has dug in and settled on a strategy of even more bitter and unwavering opposition, redoubling their obsessive focus on a few signature culture-war issues and making it their aim to defeat or undo everything that Democrats propose.

In a sense, the Republicans are victims of their past success. It was once a winning strategy for them to pound on social issues, demonizing their opponents as godless heathens, perverted gays, lazy entitled minorities, dirty contraception-using sluts, pointy-headed intellectuals, and all the other slurs that could be relied on to rile up their traditional base of old, white Christian men, to get them to believe their way of life was threatened and storm to the polls in defense of it. (Newt Gingrich was one of the pioneers of this strategy, in a 1990s memo titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control”.)

But by refusing to acknowledge changing demographic realities, Republicans have trapped themselves in an ideological death spiral. As America becomes more diverse and less religious, it’s crucial to their future electoral prospects to broaden their appeal beyond old white Christian men. But to do that, they’d have to cast votes that would grate against the already frayed nerves of those base voters, who are anxious over a changing world and their shrinking influence in it. The result is that Republican politicians are left clinging to a smaller and smaller slice of the electorate, which, however, punishes them more and more harshly for any deviation from party orthodoxy on guns, God, gays, women or immigrants.

But for all that, we shouldn’t want to see the GOP die off or crack up. It’s unhealthy for a democracy to have just one dominant party; competition keeps politicians honest and gives them an incentive to deliver results. It’s hard to see how the party as it’s currently constituted can be saved, but it’s just barely possible that if it collapses, something more like the Republicans used to be – more friendly to science, more supportive of minority rights, more opposed to government overreach and militarism – will emerge from the ashes.